Skip to main content
Article
A Normalizing Flow-Based Co-Embedding Model for Attributed Networks
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
  • Shangsong Liang, Sun Yat-Sen University & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
  • Zhuo Ouyang, Sun Yat-Sen University
  • Zaiqiao Meng, University of Cambridge
Document Type
Article
Abstract

Network embedding is a technique that aims at inferring the low-dimensional representations of nodes in a semantic space. In this article, we study the problem of inferring the low-dimensional representations of both nodes and attributes for attributed networks in the same semantic space such that the affinity between a node and an attribute can be effectively measured. Intuitively, this problem can be addressed by simply utilizing existing variational auto-encoder (VAE) based network embedding algorithms. However, the variational posterior distribution in previous VAE based network embedding algorithms is often assumed and restricted to be a mean-field Gaussian distribution or other simple distribution families, which results in poor inference of the embeddings. To alleviate the above defect, we propose a novel VAE-based co-embedding method for attributed network, F-CAN, where posterior distributions are flexible, complex, and scalable distributions constructed through the normalizing flow. We evaluate our proposed models on a number of network tasks with several benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that there are clear improvements in the qualities of embeddings generated by our model to the state-of-the-art attributed network embedding methods.

DOI
10.1145/3477049
Publication Date
10-22-2021
Keywords
  • Attributed network,
  • embedding,
  • normalizing flow,
  • variational auto-encoder
Comments

IR Deposit conditions:

OA version: Accepted version

No embargo

Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged

Must link to publisher version with statement that this is the definitive version and DOI

Must state that version on repository is the authors version

Set statement to accompany deposit (see policy)

Citation Information
Shangsong Liang, Zhuo Ouyang and Zaiqiao Meng. "A Normalizing Flow-Based Co-Embedding Model for Attributed Networks" ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data Vol. 16 Iss. 3 (2021) ISSN: 15564681
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/shangsong-liang/16/